The SORCERER
The Witch Trilogy:Part 3
by Cheryl Potter
© Cheryl Potter 2012
‘The Chateau d’Esugny, France: 1684
This then was to be the official truth, that though Kate’s son François had escaped immediate execution, he had been condemned to the south coast galley force and had since perished in an engagement at sea.
The official truth, the version that would pass between royal envoys, through the Herries family into London society. The version she knew she must allow Louise Morin to believe if the girl was ever to know any future happiness.
François the up-and-coming apothecary; François the lover and future husband; François the son who would take on his father’s business ... that François was never coming back.
But he was not dead, she knew. She alone knew.
Somewhere out there under the very same sky was a man who had developed a physical potency greater than that of his natural father. A man in whom the knowing that had passed from her mother before her, had reached new heights....’
The Witch’s Son
Part 1: Evocation
Natural magic is nothing other
than the deepest knowledge
of the secrets of nature...
Del Rio 1606
The Return
England, November 1688
François lay in the darkness, still breathing heavily though the vision had loosed its grip. He concentrated on the spattering of rain on canvas, on the strains of a man singing somewhere in the camp outside. Margot was asleep beside him, her head pinning his arm to the pallet; the relaxed flesh of her slender thigh resting across his sweat-prickled nakedness.
Louise Morin on her knees, the base of her palms pressed against a man’s thighs in supplication ... a fist wound tightly into her thick hair.
He slid his free hand under the tumble of Margot’s chestnut hair, rubbed his palm over the crown of her shoulder then down into the hollow between arm and breast. She stirred in her sleep, intimate hair brushing moisture against his leg. His hand continued over her ribs and down under the cliff of her hipbone to the soft mound of her belly.
...the prickling numbness in Louise’s shoulders and arms, the pains that gripped her head and chest as her mind and body raged against the suffocating imposition.
He pulled gently away from Margot, curled off the mattress and crossed the tarpaulin groundsheet to the tent flap. The sharp spray of rain livened his exposed flesh as he stepped outside. Mud from the trampled turf oozed between his toes. The watch called out to him. He answered.
English rain, English mud. There had been times when he thought he would never be free to set foot on his native soil again; times when it seemed likely he would not live to do so. Thoughts of returning home, of a reunion with his mother Kate had sustained him at first. But after leaving France, during the months in Holland preparing his company for the invasion, or as some called it – the restoration of England, in the service of Prince William of Orange, doubts had set in.
Kate knew he was alive. Sensing more than was natural was as much her nature as it was his. His grandmother had been hanged for a witch, Kate had come perilously close to suffering the same fate. Persecuted for their otherness, as he too had been in France.
Kate would know he was alive. But the nearer he came to London, the greater his misgivings about going home; stirring up poignant memories, disturbing lives that by now had reformed without him.
The man he had become bore little resemblance to the youth she had given leave to travel to France five years before. That youth had withered at the hands of the torturers in Vincennes and finally perished under the whip of galley foreman, Le Fouquet. The name François Jeakes was now indelibly linked to the murder of the seamstress Jeanine Pascal. Better then for the world to believe him dead and gone. Better not to make his presence known – even to Kate – before he had done what he had come to do.
...malicious degradation; consuming, incriminating, against which she had no defence. Her cry forlorn; ‘François‒’
He stared at the Dog Star emerging through a canopy of cloud. Louise could not know that he was alive. Her cry had been instinctive – harking back to those days of tender promise before he had left for France, when everything had seemed possible. She had been the love of the youth François Jeakes, his mother’s staunch companion when she followed him to France. Her desolation had reached him twice in Holland, and again tonight. In her anguish she claimed him still.
The star blinked then went out. Not even the night chill could rid him of the heaviness the vision had left him to. No help for her, except perhaps in him.
Strange, that he should at last find his way home as a soldier in an invading army. Even if the Protestant Prince of Orange had been invited to take the English throne by Whig opponents of his Catholic father-in-law, King James II, his army welcomed more or less all the way en route from Torbay, it still made him an invader in his native land. And at dawn they were due to decamp and progress to Sion House to join the Dutch battalions with Prince William and Marshal Schomberg ready for the march on London.
Forewarned by the brush of canvas behind him, he was not startled by Margot’s touch. Her cheek pressed between his shoulders. He pulled her hands fully round his waist, and sheltered her elbows and forearms under his. She shivered and moulded herself against his back.
‘Will they fight, the men of London?’ she murmured. ‘They say that the king’s army is lying in wait by the city gates – that we could never defeat so many.’
He thought of the Londoners that he had known; the gritty lightermen and stevedores, the volatile market traders and broad-shouldered craftsmen toiling away in cobbled yards and forges. He thought of the men he had watched his apothecary stepfather patch up in the morning after their drunken brawls, the apprentices who needed little excuse to run riot through the streets. London was not Brixham or Exeter to be walked over. For old King Charles the capital would have rallied and fought to the bitter end. But for the brother who had succeeded him, for James who had allowed himself to be steered by a coterie of Jesuit henchmen and only days ago tried to flee to the safety of Catholic France, that was a different story.
He turned within her grasp and brushed the hair clear of her face.
‘This from the woman who stood up to Magistrate Bremon and defied her own father, for my sake?’ he chided.
‘I am not afraid, only curious.’
He laughed at the haughty recoil, caught her behind the knees and, stumbling on the wet turf as she put up a show of resistance, carried her back inside the tent. In the shadows he lay on her, his chest levered up to avoid crushing her breasts, his hands clasping hers above her head. He gnawed at the musky down under her ear, quelling her nipping teeth.
‘Is she beautiful?’ she asked as if reading his mind.
He rested his elbows either side of her face and linked his fingers over her forehead.
‘Louise was lovely ... and so are you,’ he conceded.
‘But her claim on you is greater.’
He frowned. Margot was not by nature a jealous woman; proud, yes – vulnerable now that she had left her native France. But the closer they came to London, the greater her anxiety, the more watchful she seemed. It was as though she feared his old life was waiting to swallow him up.
‘Why do you say that?’ he countered.
‘It is for her that you are going back, no? It is her who comes to you in dreams.’
‘Not dreams, Margot ... the things I see are all too real, as though part of my being becomes one with the person; suffering the same feelings, a terrible knowing that comes unbidden,
demanding something of me.’
‘How could I not know?’ she murmured. ‘After Paul, such things I do not forget. My little brother had been gone for a day and a night when you found him. Most of the goats had found their own way home. The men were out all night with their torches – we all were. Maman prayed until she could pray no longer...’ She pulled away the finger he placed on her lips to quieten her. ‘...just before dawn she went outside and pulled the necks of her two best hens. She carried their plump carcasses to the rock of the ancients on the hill above our house‒’
‘It was chance, nothing more; a hunted man taking a drink from a stream – I found Paul trapped face down in the reeds ... carried him to the nearest house.’
‘Yet the hens were there for all to see – thin trails of blood dried into the stone. Maman had called on the old gods; that was why the villagers were so afraid of you – why they called you le sorcier. Perhaps it was good they did not see what happened when you laid him on our kitchen table – or they might not have been content simply to hand you over to the magistrate.’
He shook his head. ‘I revived him, no more than that ... I trained as an apothecary‒’
‘You are a healer, François. I saw with my own eyes – his skin was like wax ... you brought back life where none had been. It was a miracle.’ She craned her neck up towards him and kissed his lips.
‘Any more a miracle than saving an escaped galley convict from the magistrate who was intent on returning him to certain execution?’ he breathed. ‘You have nothing to fear from London. Just remember, from now on no more François. I am Captain Fuller, Frank to you.’
‘And this something demanded of you?’
‘When the time comes, I will know what to do.
Touchwood
London, 11 December 1688
Anna Jeakes scudded down the alley behind St Martin’s Lane. Her cloak and hair were flying behind her, the devil at her heels. Though her eyes could hardly penetrate the shadows, familiarity guided her fingers to the gate latch. She hurled herself at the opening ironwork and lurched into the back garden of the apothecary – the home she and her mother Kate had moved out of four years earlier. Slipping out of her cloak, she swung herself under the lower branches of the chestnut tree and began to climb.
The echoing thud of boots signalled the approaching pursuer. She froze – a man’s height above the ground, her forehead pressed against a branch. The footfall paused by the still creaking gate ... a venturesome step ... a hiss into the gloom; ‘Come out puss, be done with your teasing.’
She caught the folds of her skirt, trapped them between her knees in case their flapping should give her away.
Moments before, she had been on Drury Lane watching townsfolk and gangs of city apprentices sack the home of the Spanish ambassador. So many silhouettes toing and froing in the firelight, wrecking and plundering. The word was out; the fleeing papists had carried all their best things there for safekeeping, the place was filled with jewels and plate and clothes.
All the world seemed to be ablaze tonight - like the time of the great fire her mother had told her about. The night sky glowed orange above the rooftops and everywhere was pother and noise. She had been showered with ash from a bonfire made of books and religious icons on the courtyard outside the ambassador’s house. The smell of smoke still clung to her hair. Trembling with excitement she had watched flames leap from the shattered windows of the upper storeys, watched men haul roof timbers from the chapel building up the bonfire while the militia stood idly by.
In all her sixteen years she had never felt so alive. The wildness of the day had touched the aching restlessness in her – kindled it, fanned it, until the blood in her veins turned to fire and there was no sense of time, no ground under her feet.
It had begun at first light, stealing away from her home in Tyburn Lane as her mother Kate tended the whooping child brought to their door; finding herself carried along by a crowd surging towards the King’s Road.
The king had deserted London during the night, had run away to join the queen. Down with popery and slavery! Hurrah for the liberators – William, Prince of Orange, and his Protestant army! God speed their march from Abingdon.
All day she had roamed the congested thoroughfares; threading her way between wagons piled high with chattels; past coaches filled with the ashen faces of Catholics who in the space of a night had lost their royal protector. On Fleet Bridge she had pushed her way through to the front of the crowd to see the exodus of lighters and riverboats. And she who had been brought up with no religion, yelled with all her heart;
‘The liberties of England and the Protestant religion!’
By the afternoon word spread that the city of Rochester was burning, fired by the retreating papists – or else the Irish – that they meant to have London too, would burn all Protestant heretics in their beds. The news took like a spark to tinder. Swords were unsheathed; oranges impaled on their tips to declare allegiance to the Prince of Orange.
And as night fell, lawlessness had its way.
While Anna watched the rioters at work on the bonfire, as her imagination made will-o-the-wisps of the flaring sparks, a heavy arm curled around her shoulders.
Though her stomach lurched, she did not shrink from the attentions of the militiaman ... from the fingers that fastened her upper arm ... the intimate warmth of his stale breath. Abandon was the order of the day.
Curious, she took the roughness of his moustache upon her throat; marked the quickening of his breath as, encouraged by her passivity, he began to squeeze her breasts through the stuff of her bodice. She took to herself his long hair, the tunic unbuttoned to the waist; savoured the maleness of tobacco, of leather and sweat. Then, a sensation as of a clenched fist coming up under her ribs – an intense sparking pleasure.
A sensation rediscovered; evoking for her that thundery night so long ago when a dark figure had led her eleven-year-old self out of a rain-sodden graveyard, to a place beyond childhood and unknowing. A place from which her mother had dragged her back. Rescued her, Cassy had said. In truth, left her to numbing wistfulness.
The touch of a man; the want, the strength of a man – was this then where it was to be found – in the very thing her mother had so many times warned her against?
He had drawn her towards a timber stack in a nearby yard, the militiaman, but she knew where it had to be ... grass, her tree. She would come to womanhood in the shadow of her old home; within earshot of the man who now slept in what had for so long been her room.
‘Show yourself, minx!’ The militiaman’s irritation jolted her back to the present moment. ‘Or I’ll take my florin elsewhere.’
He took her for a whore but she did not mind. Some of the girls who worked for Cassy, the procuress, were no older than she. Peering between the branches, she scanned the apothecary windows. Downstairs, Ursula the housemaid was clearing the dinner table. Above, at the window of her old room, a narrow sliver of light told her that Pierre Chevalier was there. It was what she had hoped for; if not him then close to him. In his presence.
Releasing the folds of her skirt, she flexed her trembling knees and sprang down on to the turf.
‘S’truth!’ the militiaman started. ‘That’s where you were, you little witch.’
Anna wrapped her fingers in the flaps of his tunic, guiding him down as she dropped to her knees on the damp grass.
‘Here‒?’ he queried, glancing round..
She pulled harder. ‘Here.’
He eased the gate back on to its keeper then swung back and gripped her shoulders.
‘You won’t slip me this time.’ There was mastery in the rough way he pushed her down to the ground and hitched up her skirts.
The distant cries of a mob wafted over the apothecary garden; a ripple of explosions. In the house someone dashed aside drawn curtains to stare after the sound. Anna shivered. It was him, the man she had so often admired in secret – surely it was him. She raised her arms to the soldier as th
ough welcoming a lover ... as though he were the Chevalier ... this the long desired moment.
But there was no tenderness in the man straddling her. He caught her wrists, unceremoniously pinned them above her head. His weight crashed down on her chest and hips, a heavy hand stopped any chance of crying out. Her stomach dropped. A wave of nausea snuffed the excitement; in place of anticipation there came overwhelming foreboding. She lurched against him, trapped between the grinding weight and the winter cold earth, desperate to escape the stabbing that must surely tear her apart.
No, not this ... merciful God, not this ... Mother!
Anna’s eyes found the window where she was convinced Pierre Chevalier was standing, willing him to see, to come down and help her. But there was no help, no one to stop the suffocating onslaught, to hear her stifled agony.
The curtains at the window were pulled to again. And the blackness was complete.
Pierre Chevalier leaned back against the heavy curtains. He was balanced on the window ledge. His arms were folded, his legs stretched out in front as he tapped the edge of his shoe against the Turkey rug in time with the clock pendulum.
He had offered – no, more than that – he had argued that he should go with his father and Anton Morin if they meant to witness for themselves what was happening in London tonight. The subtle show of disappointment on being instructed to stay behind to watch over the women of the house, the dutiful compliance: how easily he played his father.
What was it to him if Chancellor Jeffries had been caught in some alehouse, disguised and attempting to escape? He did not share his father’s concern about the breakdown of law and order. The old order needed to be swept away. Let the mob rout the Catholic canker; let their mass houses be razed to the ground. Give them a taste of the persecution his family – all Huguenot families, had suffered in France.
The Sorcerer (The Witch Trilogy Book 3) Page 1